Facebook crushing MySpace, new stats show

First they came for Bebo and now it looks as if even larger rival MySpace is losing the battle against the social networking steamroller that is Facebook.

By
John E Dunn
| Apr 28, 2010

Share

TwitterFacebookLinkedInGoogle Plus

First they came for Bebo and now it looks as if even larger rival MySpace is losing the battle against the social networking steamroller that is Facebook.

A new analysis from Arbor Networks taken from traffic through 110 of the Internet’s largest service providers shows that between March 2007 and April 2010, Facebook grew from nothing to reach more than 0.5 percent of all Internet traffic.

As impressive as this number sounds, it excludes traffic through what are known as content delivery networks (CDNs) such as Akamai, so the true number could be higher still. In short, Facebook is now an Internet giant on a scale exceeded by only companies such as Google, another player whose traffic rise Arbor has charted in recent times.

Strikingly, Facebook’s rise is paralleled almost exactly by a ‘zero sum’ decline in rival MySpace, which has plummeted from traffic peaks of up to 0.6 percent of all Internet traffic in 2008 to today’s sub-0.1 percent figure. Facebook’s traffic needs are now believed to be the equivalent of more than 30,000 servers.

The graph published by Arbor makes stark reading not only for MySpace but for all other social networks that hope to carve a niche in the English-speaking world and beyond.

“While Facebook may not yet have the same infrastructure footprint as Google or other larger Hyper Giants, the game is clearly afoot. Leveraging wholesale datacenters, third-party CDNs and a raft of partnerships and alliances, Facebook may yet outgrow competitors with an all encompassing social media cum application platform,” says Arbor’s stat guru, Craig Labovitz.

The Internet has always been seen as being in a state of permanent flux, but it also appears that traffic levels in some way now speak of Internet power and this is shifting inexorably towards fewer and fewer super-companies. The Internet could have embarked on the defining period in its history that will rub out some well-known names.